The site was later moved to the Perl NOC. US mirrors were hosted by YellowBot and Phyber and a European mirror has been hosted by digital craftsmen for the last 10 years. These amazing people and companies helped make the site a success.

In recent years maintenance has become a burden. Most of the site is running 2005 era Perl code. Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition and is nearly ready to take over.

Shortly, a link will be added to all pages on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change. After about a month, all traffic will be redirected to the equivalent MetaCPAN page.

We would like to thank all who have assisted with this project. An extra special thanks to Graham for his hard work and unwavering support of search.cpan.org for all these years. To search.cpan.org -- we will miss you.

Update #1 (2018-05-19): There's some confusion around whether or not existing search.cpan.org URLs will continue to work. They will! The vast majority of of them will be transparently served by MetaCPAN pages. You do not need to update any links right now.

@unknown i don’t know Graham’s reasoning, but in my experience your question says that you vastly overestimate the chance people actually help and underestimate the effort it is to receive help (half baked patches, dealing with other people’s bugs). The cpan.org site is on GitHub and has years old bugs that nobody is helping with.

@unknown, there's an old term in Perl, the 'milliBarr' which applies to Graham's particular style. I patched it a number of times, but there was one problem I couldn't quite put my finger on so, I asked JHI, then the P5 Pumpking, to have a look and even he was bewildered. I wonder if his #WTF comment is still in there. :)

Correct, almost all existing URLs are supported (including the s.c.o api) there are a few metacpan does not have an equivalent for (browsing authors alphabetically for example) but we didn't feel were going to be missed.

I find the current wording on http://search.cpan.org a bit harsh and reminiscent of "Perl is dead" - esp. if people do not click through to the NOC posting.

Maybe somebody can change it to something like (taken from the NOC announcement):

--- START ---

It's with sad hearts that we are announcing that search.cpan.org will be retired on the 25th of June 2018.

Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition and is nearly ready to take over.

Shortly, a link will be added to all pages on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change. After about a month, all traffic will be redirected to the equivalent MetaCPAN page.

We would like to thank all who have assisted with this project. An extra special thanks to Graham for his hard work and unwavering support of search.cpan.org for all these years. To search.cpan.org -- we will miss you.

--- END ---

See alsohttps://twitter.com/domm_favors_irc/status/997372975946100736

Greetings,domm

PS: And of course a lot of thanks to all people involved in setting up / running search.cpan.org!!

search.perl.org is incredibly helpful to make Perl powerful. It is only recently that metacpan has shown up as a viable alternative. And while I have a slight preference for the presentation on search.perl.org when I want to read module docs (no space wasted for a left column), I understand that maintaining two overlapping tools isn't what you want to do for a long time, and also the metadata on metacpan often are very useful.

But as others have said: I really hope that the name "search.cpan.org" will remain forever, even if the implementation will be done with metacpan code. It is one of the best trademarks Perl ever had.

Still, I bristle at being left off of that as you have no idea the epic amount of time spent propping that site up for years at WU. Also, Ben Hockenhull hosted another system at Webster U. just down the street. Alan Burlison got Sun to donate the hardware, too.

Every time I search for "perl MODULE::NAME" search.cpan.org come up first. I would say 80% of the documentation I find goes to search*. Are these SEO seedings going to be broken after the move, or are there going to be redirect mappings to ensure the rankings stay relevant?

CPAN's web interface was an incredible feature and way ahead of its time. Other communities were still pointing people to FTP servers when CPAN had a full-featured search interface with fancy online documentation.

I got a chance to work on the code back in the day - I added the grep and diff features and a few other things, I think.

Thank you for many years of helpful package management resources! Saying 2005 era perl code is out of date makes me feel super old! I think that's the first year I started learning pearl. MUCH LOVE! AND RESPECT!

This headline may cause some readers (e.g. who see it via Hacker News) to believe that a pillar of Perl is being taken down as part of a perceived decline in Perl ... I wish it could be rewritten as "Perl Community Upgrades Interface to Modules; search.cpan.org Replaced by metacpan.org"

As a relative newcomer to perl, but having been a system admin for over 10 years, I've always felt search.cpan.org was a bit clunky, and I generally prefer to use metacpan because of its familiar Wikipedia-like interface.

However, I appreciate the value search provides and I understand that the pros who have been using it for forever will find it hard to adjust.

I am a bit shocked to find out that the code was never open sourced, given this is an open source community, and I am really surprised there's not more of a clamor from the aforementioned old pros to open source it now so that some dedicated fan could fork it.

Given that it doesn't seem likely that will happen, could you at least work with the internet archive project to make a completecomplet rendering of the site before the transition, so we can still access it via the wayback machine? I know something similar was done for other sites (geocities anyone?)

I'd like to be able to show my kids the site in 15 or 20 years when they are (hopefully) doing coding for a living themselves.